Spicy Comic #6

Imagine this scenario: You are out shopping all day and you’ve been browsing stores in different locations. It took you a while to find that perfect gift you were searching for and now the exhaustion is kicking in.

You start to think about that delicious cup of coffee from your favorite coffee place when you receive a message from your AI powered personal assistant. It “gets” that you may be tired from all that walking and that you could use a cup, so it’s showing you the nearest Blue Bottle location. Pretty cool, right?

But how does a chatbot know when you need a coffee break? Creepy as it may sound, it got to know you well by learning your habits. A bot’s smarts come from AI technology, machine learning techniques to be precise, which enable it to track, record, and learn your behaviors.

Powered by this capability, a bot will identify patterns in your daily habits and track your actions to make relevant, eerily precise and timely suggestions based on them.

Now, let’s explain this in context of the above-mentioned scenario.

For example, you tap on your messaging app of choice and type in “Where can I buy unique birthday gifts in San Francisco?”

A bot answers “There’s a Rare Gifts store and it’s only a five minute walk away at Market street” followed by “Would you like to see their product catalogue?”

…and the conversation continues. With each new interaction, you’re “feeding” the AI engine behind the bot with the information it needs to learn, adapt to, and ultimately predict your needs. Hence the above mentioned coffee break recommendation.

You see, a chatbot can be quite knowledgeable - it’s aware of your location and understands the context and intent behind your questions and actions. Therefore, these chats between you and your intelligent assistant are extremely personalized and relevant to your needs. They flow and progress naturally emulating human to human interactions.

This type of intelligent chatbot can be genuinely useful and fun to use. And in the next few years we’ll definitely see more creative applications and use cases that will build new and exciting connections between people and machines (bots).

Until then, plan your weekend, ask a bot about the weather forecast and check with your personal banking bot if you can afford to treat yourself with something nice. If not, you can always go for a freshly brewed cup of your favorite coffee.

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